[1269] Sand Castles

I wanna explore for a bit why “I’m not the one.”

This initially comes from growing up in a hood-adjacent wanna-be gangster kind of mindset. Not that I, or any of my friends, actually wanted to be gangsters, but we grew up close enough to Gary that of my friend group, at least half had a solid amount of their cousins actively affiliated kind of thing. We did things like carry knives to school, not because we had to, because we were itchy. You grow up in a space where enough people talk a certain level of trash, and it’s not unheard of that one of you or your affiliates will get into some wholesale immature “Oh fuck, I just stabbed a guy” kind of shit.

The point being, you’re primed and you find the mindset. With me, it goes a step deeper though. I grew up on stories of what my grandpa did to Nazis. I really enjoyed those stories. I’ve also had enough physical training and/or altercations to know I’m not the kind of guy that wilts and cries if you hit him in the face. I do the opposite and react like I’ve just scored a power up in a Mario game. I’m 6’ 2“, 225-ish pounds, and built in a way that my muscle needs some persuading to pop, but is no less there. I’ve, rarely, felt like I couldn’t handle pretty much anyone or any situation that might constitute ”threat.“

But it gets worse, I’m also smart. I’m also charismatic. I’m also funny. I have a nice smile. I could lose all my hair tomorrow and still run whatever game I’ve been able to in the past. So, when I don’t wanna project myself as some kind of nonsense “tough guy,” I can disarm and infiltrate just on what I learn about or read off you. You can read hours of chronicling how people have reacted to that capacity over the years.

I think it’s relevant to bring up now because I’m up against fascism big and small. I’m up against the monolith that is impersonal generalized animalistic stupidity, greed, and ambivalence. I have to have the patience and wisdom to navigate systems that are almost wholly corrupt and well-rehearsed in their capacity for breaking people and rendering their sense of self and agency mute. Surely, some ego-ridden mere mortal isn’t up to the task.

Rarely, and I promise it’s rare, do I put my whole ass into something. I’ve almost never had to. Me at 10-20%, in my experience, is most people’s 150-200%. They’re exhausted. They’re excuse ridden. They’re distracted. They’re mature and evolved and the things I might try to shed some light on they’re above and beyond. They’re normal people, and I’m absolutely fucking not normal people.

So when I say something like “I’m not the one,” practically, I’m talking not just about a propensity to unduly and indefinitely obsess about something. That’s your typical autistic-type. I’m talking about my creativity. I’m talking about that special sauce that gets you cast on The Real World. I’m talking about asymmetrical warfare. The answers to your problems have been written by thousands of people who have suffered deeper than you and discovered the bounty of the infinitely creative well of retribution. You just have to learn about and implement them. You have to have balls. You have to know that, fundamentally, it’s just people you’re up against, and people are super squishy.

I’m also incredibly mean and malicious. I’m not hesitating. I’m not full of regret. I’m not “debating” the wisdom of a course of action because I’ve done that homework for years before I landed on how I’m on my way to fuck you. To be sure, I mean fuck you back. I’m not sitting around looking for excuses to make my presence and capacity known. I wish I could get left the fuck alone. No no, I have to react. I have to reshape my reaction into a testament to my values and drive and capacity so it doesn’t just end up as some reactionary nonsense helplessly flailing in the face of the powers that be.

That’s the level I don’t think nearly anyone is thinking on. I look at the living examples of the rich tech bros not clocking that there’s actual people living in the areas they want to skull fuck for data centers. Even the proverbially richest and “smartest” people on the planet don’t seem to understand the game. It’s not about the money. It’s not about your egomaniacal grand design. It’s about your understanding and articulation of the playing field and your willingness to exploit in ways that go undetected. The fact that you know what Project 2025 is testifies to the stupidity of loud alleged power brokers.

“But aren’t you over here telling us what you’re capable of?!”

Am I? Or am I giving you the pretext to write me off? Am I saying anything, really, with this writing? Have I made a specific threat or declaration? Have I alluded to my powerful friends? What is this but a silly empty boast?

I think one of my favorite things about me is that anyone who meets me or gets to know me knows I’m not the one. It’s not something I need to say. I carry it. I embody it. I exercise it in small ways every day. All it means is I’m accountable to what I say and what I want. It’s not some magically more complicated and powerful sentiment than that. It means I have a life of evidence that suggests when I point my brain and being at something, things are going to go a certain way, or else.

Again, you can read some extra drama into that sentiment if you like, but that feels unhelpful. I’m often hamstrung by my generally aloof “artsy”-esque existence that swings wildly from positions of immense authority and responsibility to months of watching TV and eating ramen. To me it’s important to clock that I can do both well. I’m not stuck. I’m not destined. I’m not so lacking in self-awareness or self-esteem than any given state says the relevant thing about me.

I’ve been marching this whole time. I’ve been protesting indefinitely. I’ve been exercising my creativity and pushing towards my goals persistently. As I come upon (ha) what will soon be an influx of more money and more time, even and in spite of what I have to piss away to bring some accountability to some shitty PDs, the best and worst about me is going to get a chance to shine in some new and unique ways. I’m incredibly excited by this.

People say things like “I don’t give a fuck.” I don’t believe them. I give so many fucks. I give way too many fucks. But I give so many fucks that it overflows into a form of “I don’t give a fuck.” Like horseshoe theory for psychology. I don’t want to die, for example, but I would die elated violently crashing against the things I’m always fighting. I beat the shit out of a door yesterday. That’s a really silly thing to do for someone who doesn’t have health insurance. But, at my core, I don’t give a fuck lol. It’s so weird, right? Shit needed to get hit, so I hit, a lot, really hard until I didn’t have to anymore.

I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t want to destroy, necessarily. I will. I will laugh like I graduated to full blown personality disorder as I swing way. I will infect areas of your life you forgot were there. I will exploit who and whatever I need to so that it doesn’t trace back to me. And, literally, every single person who knows me knows I’m absolutely capable.

So, I fret here and there. I get annoyed and resentful of having to deal with bureaucracy and noise. I’m just human. It’s that next step that matters. It’s that agency. It’s that planning and execution. And I’m salivating about the future demonstrations.

[1268] 925

Because modernity has given us an infinite caricature around the word “victim,” I think we’ve run the danger of pretending like people aren’t or can’t be victimized.

 

Because I was asking for it as part of a self-harm ritual, I posted a recent digression to reddit, describing how circumstances have been victimizing me. The ever-reliably unhelpful, hateful, wildly ignorant and incorrect takes flooded in. They extracted I was a drug addict. I’m just complaining. I need to take accountability. Of course, most only commented to say they weren’t willing to read the whole thing, always a gem-like spot of brilliance that needs to be shared.

 

I find myself repeating to clients often how little they should “simply ruminate” on a problem and find themselves in a fake court room arguing to a non-existent judge in service to winning nothing. People stay stuck chasing an answer to “why” and arguing for “their side” indefinitely, and when they can’t find relief, they use.

 

I’m stubbornly self-aware. I can’t unhear what I advocate nor take back the amount of time/effort I’ve practiced not being “whiny” as one commenter stated. I know there’s a series of decisions between me and compounding the vibe that allows me to flip the fuck out or make things worse. I know that the stress and emotional withdrawal will pass, if never as quickly as I’d like.

 

It’s 3:51 PM after I got the license suspension notice in the mail at around midnight last night. I’ve reached out to more lawyers. I’ve spoken with my dad who’s stepped up again to help me pay for some things. This will be the second time I’ve written. I’ve fought with AI, called the BMV, got an SR22 pending from my insurance company, and have who I think I need to call on Monday with the questions lined up to ask.

 

My victim-to-how-to-responsibly-take-control-of-what-I-can turn-around isn’t even a day old. I’ve got an $82 Uber ride scheduled for 6:50 PM. I reasoned the cost of getting to and from the show tonight, if it’s under $200, that will likely be less than what it would cost me to catch a misdemeanor, tow/impound a car, or other set of hidden fees associated with ambivalent predatory systems.

Is this what those cunts meant about accountability? Will they take any for talking like judgmental ignorant assholes? HA! It’s people like them that design, execute, and creatively twist the screws of those systems. How do they find the time to be such enthusiastic internet cliches?

 

If I needed a special exemption to drive, which in a world that could flirt with making sense again, if I got pulled over, I’d say I was driving for Door Dash, because I do work for Door Dash and without my dad would literally be out of money again. Not that I haven’t made a few thousand that’s incoming already, but don’t you know, according to online wisdom I need to also get a job and pay for crimes!

 

God knows it’s the most hardened criminals that have policy lapses. The cops who illegally searched me were doing me a favor by not having my car towed too, right? I should be grateful. The State’s own negligence and oversights doesn’t pay me on time, therefore I don’t pay my bill on time, therefore when I get pulled over for any reason like a burnt headlight I not just could but should suffer the aggression and presumption of the officer, let it go when they lie and invent reasons to be invasive, and then just join in the comments hating on and dog-piling the police like I’m helpless?

 

This is the prescription from you fucking lazy reddit morons, but you don’t have the balls or maturity to state it plainly.

 

I don’t have a criminal record. I don’t do drugs. My literal day job is the active practice of slowing down, breathing, parsing language, asking better questions, looking for agency, and finding the way through patently insane and unfair circumstances until we arrive at a place that doesn’t, REASONABLY beg you to check the fuck out if you occupy that space for too long. I don’t shy away from the extreme hatred and frustration I feel. I did, in fact, beat the fuck out of my front door. It felt appropriate and amazing and no one got hurt.

I reached out to multiple lawyers, left multiple messages. I made plans for 2 weeks from now if shit unreasonably hits the fan. I’ve been in contact with my boss who unprompted said she’d look into how to pay me a little quicker. I’m a communication and accountability fucking monster.

 

Hatred is my drug. I can tap into an infinite well of motivation and drive to express how much I fucking hate you, everything you love, how you operate, and the lazy ridiculous unbearably incoherent and fucking stupid shit you say to justify it all. You think any one thing or series of situations geared to engineering my sense of helplessness or victimhood is going to do anything but add fuel? I’d prefer to not die or end up killing myself for something unworthy of me, but hating what’s worth it to the degree they deserve certainly feels worth it. I’m no Dolly.

[1267] Fuck

I feel horrible. I feel sick. I’m fucking livid. In these precise moments, it is explicitly why I should never own a gun. I honestly don’t know if I would use it on myself because I’m so fucking sick and tired of “the bullshit,” or some mindless pawn in the latest machine that’s fucking me.

It’s all connected.

I just got a notice in mail saying my license is suspended. According to the notice, it was mailed 8/06/2026 and would go into effect 8/24/2026. Wanna guess what day it arrived in my mailbox? Today, 8/28/2026.

Have you heard about what the fascists have been doing to the mail over the last few years?

I didn’t have insurance because I didn’t get paid on time. I’m paid by the state of Indiana for providing counseling services to people who, rarely, have their licenses, or have fees and months of deferment programs they must complete to be eligible for cars and insurance they can’t afford either.

I got cited for not having insurance because an aggressive presumptive piece of shit cop decided to turn a warning over a newly burned out headlight into a drug search operation and “fuck you” for being nervous.

I was scolded by an attorney for paying the fee for not having my insurance, because it’s an admission of guilt, that then kicks off a notice to the BMV, which then kicks off an automatic suspension, none of which is explained anywhere. Leaving aside the “how do you pay for tickets, fees, insurance if you’re not allowed to drive to work” question, in what fucking world does it make sense to suspend someone’s license when they can, and in my case did, pay for the fucking insurance 2 hours later?

I didn’t just pay it, I paid it with money I didn’t really have to spend, and with the hope and prayer that in the next few days I was going to actually receive my several months of back wages. Did I get those several months? Of course not, just enough to immediately fly back out the window in service to other back bills and getting the footage from my illegal search.

Can I find an attorney to call me back between now and when I start to qualify for the misdirected AARP mail I get? Of course not. Do I also have a pending court battle over a camera’s claim to my level of speeding through a work zone? Of course I do. Is 95% of this piece of shit state fucking traffic cones and work zones? It has been basically my entire life. Now they’re finding ways to ensure you get extracted from for their ongoing corruption and negligence.

I have several engagements in Chicago, Fort Wayne, Milwaukee, and I work over an hour away in Indianapolis. I’m just…going to be driving on a suspended license. I don’t have a choice. (He said, knowing he has choices that are otherwise deeply inconvenient or unreasonable to ask of anyone around him.) I’m in a borrowed car too, from a friend named Hussain.

But this is the thing, right? Get idiots in charge who don’t think things through, who don’t have compassion, and who don’t believe there’s anything wrong with being a perpetually punishing and judgmental force, and watch people suffer, dance, and exhaust themselves from your petty perch of provincial power. Does it matter who you are, how you conduct yourself, how much you work, or how much you’re already sacrificing to make your life nominally work? Fuck no, fuck you.

When do I get to try and handle all of this too? Early morning Monday during work? While I’ve got a dozen women asking things of me and making excuses about why they can’t emotionally handle their own struggles with the BMV or the courts?

I’m an angry person, but I’m not a shitty one. I treat people who are exasperatingly terrible to me well. I remain deferential and respectful to people who have earned every ounce of my hateful thoughts and sentiments about them. I work as hard as I fucking can to balance what little fucking time I have on this planet between what I’d like to accomplish, create, or consider my responsibilities. I try, really, fucking, hard to keep my shit together and not spiral indefinitely on the deep and ridiculously unnecessary injustice embedded into every fucking miserable moment.

And, so what?

“The universe” doesn’t care. Your gods have a habit of keeping me abandoned. There’s no amount of money I can make an hour. There’s no amount of time I can “go without.” I can, literally, sit still for weeks at a time, and the moment I leave my house, it’s going to be some notice in the mail like this, some new policy or consequence I have to carry that has nothing to do with sense or need and just to do with “fuck you, because.” I’ll be insisted upon to see or practically worship the smallest lights of decent people or competent acts as evidence that “it’s not all bad,’ and that I should just keep the faith for one more day.

It’s bullshit. It actually is all bad, and you have to be a delusional fucking moron to pretend otherwise. Say I call the clerk, and I can save $250 by getting a form filed and confirmed for 3 months. Great, I don’t get the stress relief back from this moment. Great, all I have to do is stay in panic mode and try to drive perfectly so that the infinite in-between time it takes systems to update or flags to clear doesn’t compound what will already be an excruciating and terrifying conversation were I to get pulled over again.

In the meantime as well, I’ll get regular reminders that I have to keep fighting to get any remote kind of justice for the bullshit police have put me through to kick off this saga. I have to shoulder the fees I can’t afford yet, shouldn’t be obligated to pay or afford in the first place, and the emotional burden of how long it takes to make even a little better a catastrophic failure wholly imposed. Some oppressed minority group out there I’m sure is weeping deeply with me, but let’s just note my cynicism that knows how itchy people are to compare their victimhood instead of, you know, finding solidarity and banding together to fucking do anything about it.

Fuck those cops. Fuck Indiana. Fuck the BMV. Fuck cars. Fuck this whole sordid game of pretend like there’s any goddamn adults or sense behind any of it. I’m not “coping” with this. This isn’t something I ever resolve or incorporate. This is a cancer that needs eradicated. This is a state of being that has sucked my will to live for as long as I’ve been conscious. Even when I get a “win” or think I’m “trending” in the right direction, this kind of shit just fucking manifests like I’m in some hellish game show meant to keep me fucked.

On my best day, I wish I didn’t have to fear and anticipate “things” attacking my money, peace of mind, or basic sense of decency. I can’t. I can’t trust one day to the next that I’m going to be “okay” in a kind of way that doesn’t make me genuinely express how unreasonable it would be for me to own a gun.

Meanwhile, every day the worst people on the planet not only destroy the planet, get unimaginably rich doing so, destroy people’s lives for no reason beyond lies and hatred, and we’re counting on a “blue wave” to usher in a crop of new feckless idiots to pretend to know how to fight the 50-year onslaught of ignorant animals dressing up as humans. I get to feel small and insignificant in the face of the looming catastrophes around the world or at scale while the smuggest shittiest cuntiest cunts to have ever lived parade what wealth and power and consequences look like.

What is it all for? You think I’m “learning my lesson” about not having insurance this way? You think you’re “protecting and serving” by being a presumptive power-hungry cunt and lying to me? You think as long as I have near-zero money to do anything that doesn’t feel like I’m either getting away with murder, or guilt-inducing, or indulgent that’s just a generally good psychological place to trap people who we’re supposed to condemn when they snap over things like health issues and kill one of those proud to profess and protect how things operate?

You can’t make this shit up. And you can’t connect enough dots for the fucking miserable fucking idiots that piled on to help drive us here.

I’m just going to start screaming and hitting things because writing isn’t doing shit.

[1266] Here Again

I want to talk about, hopefully briefly, an old and recurring theme.

It’s been my longstanding position, and technically joke, that I would perhaps become relevant to many people in my life at about this late-30s space. After the kids have grown up a bit, the divorces, and the reality that none of us were going to be properly rewarded for being smart or hard-working. That’s been, slightly, kinda, true insofar as I’ve had at least some fleeting conversations or interactions with people who I might not have for years, but the weight of my presence is more or less carried by a single friend whoever does anything with me or carries on regular conversation.

If we think this through, it’s hard not to draw what I think people will perceive as either “damming” or “dark” conclusions. I think it implicates the past and foundation of what I perhaps mistakenly took to be “friendly” or “true” and “nice” about people. I think it spells fairly obvious and not-necessarily-

catastrophized conclusions about the future. I just sincerely wonder if it’s what anyone actually wants.

The theme in group this week has centered around what it actually means to make a choice. How much are you riding the impulsive waves of feelings or reactive insecurities and ruminating on the judgments of the forces around you? Do your feelings inform a choice, or are they steering the ship? Do you feel dependent on accessing a certain feeling to maintain a level of (what) that let’s you off the hook for what it takes to find your choice and responsibility or relationship to something?

I think I chose my friends in college at least. If nothing else, I chose whether or not to throw you out of the party or invite you back. I chose to keep trying to organize get-togethers as they felt more and more strained and the enthusiasm waned. I’ve chosen over the years to be the first one, always, to reach out. Part of me feels like this is essential to being who I am. I actually do want to talk and hang out and learn about what you’re thinking. I liked our time together back then. I like our brief stints of interaction today. I’m excited and lit up by the prospect of doing some shit in the future.

So, to that end, I don’t lay my propensities or preferences at anyone’s feet. If I’m like an aggressive pet looking for your attention, and you’re over it, that’s on me on one level. But, also, unlike a pet, I’d go away if you just said so. The ghosting or the days/weeks of not responding to a message, or the “yeah that’d be great, but…” and whatever reason you’re gonna stay busy until the end of time sweeps in. It’s like, what are we doing? I’m trying to hang. You appear to be trying to slowly break up with me for…ever?

I’ve never really wanted an online existence. I’ve never considered facebook “friendships” constitutive of the word. It’s why I invite you to the show. It’s why I say, I know how busy you are, let me come to you if that makes it logistically easier. But also, it’s hard to believe and just kind of seems to betray common decency that we can juggle this litany of things that keeps us apart, but finding an hour or an afternoon is just a bridge too far. I’m just, generally, over the dance I think. I’m not pining for the past. I’m not resentful of the country-hole I’ve put myself in. I’m just trying to hang out, and it feels like every expression of this invites a fucking blog like it’s something complicated.

My dad and uncle are coming to the area for a couple days next week. My dad’s like “we can do lunch, we can do dinner, we can bowl, see a movie…” My dad is an iron-worker driving hours to work regularly. When he’s not working, he’s working on his own business or working with my step-mom on her business, or tending to the other people in the step-family, or needs of his crew members, or trying to fix some issue that the other grown adults in his life can’t for reasons that similarly seem to betray all common sense and decency. His instinct is nonetheless time with me is worthwhile and something that can be figured out in conjunction with the other plans he and my uncle have.

It’s not hard. It’s not an excuse. It’s not “Yeah, but.”

Is literally almost everyone I’ve ever known and enjoyed spending time with cut from the same “Actually, I don’t actually give a fuck and don’t want to spend time with you” cloth? That seems, hopefully, unlikely. Are they all suffering from the same addict-adjacent condition and/or delusion that there’s like a prize at the end if they only spend one more minute doing whatever it is they’re doing first besides grabbing a burger or beer with me?

I feel struck by how much I don’t think it has anything to do with “me.” I know people aren’t thinking about me in the perfectly normal way that no one is really thinking about anyone beyond themselves. I’m not trying to sit here blind to some kind of naked irony. I’m no less getting angsty by this idea that everyone around me seems swallowed up in this hole I’ll call an abjectly lost sense of agency that’s registering as wholesale disregard for a kind of recognition and dynamic I put at the center of my values.

I want people I can talk as equals with, and joke with, and share history with. I want people who can vibe and sing along with the same music. I want people laughing together. I want people who view these things as precious and fleeting and worth practicing before we never get a chance to again. I don’t want to be invited to summarily dismiss, like it feels I’m summarily dismissed, because that’s not actually how I think or feel about the people I’m trying to share with.

So, it’s like really fucking annoying. I can’t control whether you’ll find either the balls or humility to tell me to go fuck myself, but I can write about the experience of the ambivalence. I don’t need to be handled or kicked down the road indefinitely nor do I need to beg like I’m needy in some unwarranted or entitled way. Time is running out though, you get that right?

[1265] Better Than You Ever Felt It

I think if you’re intelligent, the single hardest thing to empathize with is being stupid. You’re gonna be tempted to jump to some conclusions about what I mean when I invoke “intelligent” and “stupid.” Resist that. Consciously uncouple from assumptions as you proceed. This is my first signal to your intelligence, and claim to my own.

Language is forever imprecise and incomplete. That’s not a bid for postmodern absurdity-making circular sensibility. It means no matter what you say, no matter what you hear, if you want to practice intelligence, you give it time to breathe. It means you look for the context that might help you best understand where it was coming from. It means you build the instinct to take the infinitely abstract and look for your choice on how to relate to the information.

 

I’ve been told I was smart my whole life. I could “prove it” through grades in school, the quickness of learning an instrument, or the engineering of acquiring what I desired. All of this means nothing about my capacity for stupid. I’m easily, if not infinitely as stupid, as anyone who has ever lived. I suffer some aspect of my dumb, stupid self, every day. It might be in how I treat my body, my time, or how I conceive of “the world.”

 

For me, intelligence can grow with practice, and wither without practice. Stupidity can too. They aren’t opposite ends of a bell curve, more than they are modes of being we recognize as choices, or don’t.

 

I think it’s stupid, for example, to think I’m going to get “positive” or “productive” conversation about this writing, or anything else I’ve written, on a forum like reddit. It’s a heavily-skewed “internet culture” kind of place with a very particular kind of internet personality that inhabits it. The stupid is rewarded and part of the incentive system for how to maintain and embolden that ecosystem. In the 16 years I’ve been on the site, have I had a handful of decent exchanges or solid piece of information shared on the site? Sure, mapped against thousands of troll-esc nonsense. I’ve deleted everything I’ve ever posted across different accounts a dozen times. I’m practicing stupid in every moment I “hope” that I’ll accidentally encounter someone not wearing an internet-asshole hat.

 

There’s going to be a temptation, soon if it hasn’t happened already, to begin feeling like I’m making a moral judgment about reddit or the people on it. You’re maybe gonna wanna jump at my *hypocrisy* because that’s the priming and game the internet has trained you for. I’m going to ask that we return to refraining from assumptions.

It is hard to practice intelligence. It is hard to suffer stupidity.

 

For me, I find myself suffering the consequences of what I might frame as “other people’s stupidity,” superficially, before the intelligent practice tempers my enthusiasm to see it as anything more than an extension of my stupidity too. I, of course, still engage in the internet and the occasional troll. I feast on unhealthy things. I don’t exercise enough. I’m politically engaged, but could always be “doing more” or trying to better organize forces I could intelligently pick apart.

 

A little more concretely though, if I were to knock up my friend and she wanted to get an abortion, we’d have to suffer the stupidity of religious ideologues and scientific illiterates in order to get her healthcare. If I want to live a “normal middle-class lifestyle” it’s going to be at the expense or sacrifice of things they don’t have to in every other developed part of the world. If the measles shows up near me, that’s such a powerful exercise of stupidity that’s compounded in so many ways, you really start to wonder if we “deserve” this thing called existing.

 

I’ve considered Sam Harris a clear thinker for decades. I’ve watched and felt what feels like his decline in the last couple years. He’d, no doubt, take this as a point of pride in how often he annoys or alienates people “on both sides” of any given issue. To be sure, I don’t think an exercise of intelligence is to “pick a side.” I think you pick a practice, and your practice needs to incorporate new information and stay sensitive to its, perhaps extreme, biases.

 

I find “lumping” stupid. “Israel” doesn’t do things, Individuals in its government do. Individuals in the IDF do. So it goes for every country, population, army, etc. “Radical Islam” is a boogeyman hiding in every corner, changing shape to fit the extremist ends of any individual with the balls to blow themselves up. The “Christian Nationalists” are the same kind of thing, looking to absolve themselves of individual culpability for the cloak of righteousness or sanctity. Who knew God always wants things precisely how I want to do them? Crazy, right?

 

As an individual, the linguistic term “religion” I find incredibly stupid. I think it makes a lot of sense to form tribes, instinctively fear death, catch yourself being otherwise irreconcilably depressed or anxious if you didn’t have a psychological security blanket. I think I want the consequences of people who exercise their faith in the ways that keep people fed, housed, and advocated for. I think abstracting out the material impact of your behavior into words like “love,” “faith,” “religion,” and “beliefs” is “practicing stupid.”

 

You might feel deep personal moral injury at my position. I would suggest that’s because you’ve chosen to refuse my advice to refrain from assuming you know what I mean.

You feel what I mean. I court your confusion or indignance. We kick off our stupid practices in our respective lanes. My aim is a quieter mind, consequences for you be damned. This might be considered its own level of stupidity if we could truly know the consequences. Instead, an immediate ironic twist as it transforms into wisdom by letting things be and focusing on what I can actually control. When and whether to stop writing, and an honest assessment of my sense of well-being is all I get.

 

I’m not interested in the documentary I just watched where a right-wing anti-gay preacher let’s a gay preacher stay at his house for 5 days and vice versa. Their conversations were predictable. The excuses and victimhood of the right-winger a snore. It’s “too stupid” to me to position “your beliefs” as a meaningful bulwark against your ability to accept someone else’s humanity, rights, or equality. It’s just the same conversation ad nauseam. You can read really old books that were having this “debate” since they first started recording such things.

 

I wonder if it’s even possible to practice the kind of intelligence that gets us to a Star Trek kind of place. I think we’re kind of stuck in the consequences of stupid. I think we’ll be picking bad guys to lay collective blame on until we kill them and then ourselves. I think it’s because we’re stuck like an addict is stuck. It’s what we’ve normalized and trained on for our entire evolutionary history. I think it’s a mode of being that is perfectly ambivalent about anything beyond how it makes you feel in any given moment, and you’re super keen to given something external the power over how you feel.

 

I don’t really know what to do with this relative conclusion as someone who wants to practice and lay claim to a level of intelligence. Do i want to “save” everyone from themselves? That feels silly and impossible. Do I want to sit back and watch things burn? I’m not spending thousands of hours as a social worker or building things like civic-mirror.com because I’ve given up or check out. In the meantime, I’m still suffering things like gas prices, impending fallout from ridiculous wars, increasingly dramatic weather, negligent institutions and an impending fascist takeover. In one telling, and one version, of the story.

 

There’s a, by the numbers, large portion of people with the power to be of consequence who are actively practicing the kind of stupid that I think gets us all killed. If you’re not one of them, I think the cancer from the secondhand smoke is no less growing in you. There will never be enough Dolly Parton’s or MacKenzie Scott’s to turn the tide. I think this because of how we respond to the examples they’ve set. We post! We meme. We mock. “We” aren’t a “we.” We’re a collective unconscious “stupid” reaction at seemingly all times.

 

Then, in the moments when we are humbled or curious, we want to be given all the credit for spurts of intelligent exercise here and there. We’re like my clients who think waking up on time and making it to group on time for one week means they’ve conquered something that gives them license to slack the next.

 

What are you doing with your wealth and privileges? Are you exercising your values, or mourning what we’ll never get back when singular forces for an immense amount of good are removed from the playing board? Are you connecting to what you should? Are you practicing patience with yourself or others? Are you contextualizing your catastrophic frame of how “things” work?

 

You don’t have to be intelligent to be a decent or nice person. You don’t have to be wise to know when you’re practicing something stupid. You don’t have to know anything to experience irrational and impossible to articulate hatred. But you do have to be honest. I don’t think most people know what honesty is. I think they conflate it with being “real” or pair it to earnest weaponized feelings. Honestly, you want to manipulate me in what you’re saying, often significantly more than you’re actually feeling whatever you’re claiming to feel.

 

I think you can intelligently approach how to learn how to be honest. I think you develop a process that connects your words to how you feel, or don’t, and then enables the actions that back them up. Or, you can “just feel” in any and every direction, and leave the rest of us to figure out how to navigate the inevitable suffering.

[1264] Alone Together

I've heard 3 or more ardent expressions of feeling deeply alone from people on social media, either in earnest short-form, meme, and in real life over the last week or so.

The dumb thing to do would be take those expressions personally. What it does though, is make me wonder what precisely they mean.

These people have significantly broader social networks than me. You can see the immediate flow of support of their respective comment sections. These people have families they're significantly closer with than I'll ever be. The only thing they have in common, besides being my friend, is they are single women.

I had a discussion with one of them recently about what it meant to be alone. The idea of not being “partnered” even if, by the numbers, we spend more time together than one imagines couples in a traveling-salesman or military situation might get. We’re not “official,” but we’re also not children who live and die by porous or arbitrary definitions in order to enjoy time together.

My head is drawn towards the idea that a story is, truly, more compelling than “reality” will ever be. Especially as you get older, your standing reality in any moment is what’s racing through your head, the aches in your body, and the asks from the world that isn’t remotely concerned about your opinion. You, in your own head, can be an incredibly lonely space in its infinite capacity to dog you.

Most of my cohort are old enough now to have occupied decently “responsible adult” and “serious person” positions only to be faced with the high school inane absurdity and chaos inherent in everything. For some reason we like to trick ourselves into thinking we’re the only ones who can notice in spite of literal thousands of performers and pieces of art that synthesize and connect our experiences.

But it’s not the same things as “feeling like” someone “really loves” you, right? It’s talking across purposes to suggest “I’m right here” or “We literally could have plans this weekend” or “You can always call me.”

It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s based on evidence. It doesn’t seem to matter if it will last. You just want to believe, which I think is the shape of the hole. If you can’t pacify it, you stick drugs and alcohol in it, or you internet troll, or you compulsively work, or you get creepily invested in a hobby or personality affect, or you jam a god or something spiritual inside.

But I think it’s deeper than that, because I’m someone who often feels “isolated,” but not necessarily “alone.” I seek out connection all the time, often from people who almost feel like they’re actively running from even getting lunch every 6 months. Learning late in life that I’m probably more autistic than not became it’s own kind of “ah ha” moment, and that’s a kind of solidarity you can only find with those types. Being “high-achieving” has always carried it’s own kind of baggage, but I’m finding it downright amazing to have found a job where my boss is of the same ilk.

I have a strong painting-like memory of a morning where me and my 5 or 6 roommates were all doing whatever we were doing in our respective zones of space across the living room and kitchen. We are all “alone” together. The sun was hitting the space just right. Everyone seemed contented. It was so unique and so encompassing, I’ve written about it before. It was kinda like the same “click” that happens during a good shroom or acid trip, where the purpose and flow of being conscious together makes more sense than you could ever fully articulate.

To my mind, that reality is available to us right now, today, as often as we choose and practice it. Every time I write, I’m reaching out. Usually it’s into a space where all I can receive is immature armchair irony psychology, but it’s a reach nonetheless. For decades now, I’ve felt my general effort to connect functionally rebuked 95% of the time. I’ve had a dozen or so “friends from college” live an hour or less away from me for years, and it wasn’t until Brandy moved back from Florida that I’ve had anyone to regularly spend time with that wasn’t my dad.

It just feels like an exhausting act. It reminds me of when I could tell that a girl was clearly “more into me,” (which is the wildly wrong way to state it, but I think articulates the point) than I was her. No, I don’t want kids and marriage, but it doesn’t mean I never want to talk or see you again if we stop fucking around? But this high-stake either/or game gets played because we’re apes first, and people murder over jealousy more often than money.

I’m not exaggerating, I’ve probably offered to go to any type of food at any time of day, invited or offered to pay for any kind of show, low estimate 500 times across dozens of people over the last let’s say 8 years because that’s when I started working “real jobs.” That’s about once every week. It was way higher when I was younger and we were partying every weekend or had little else to do each week in school or I had the bills paid with drug studies.

What are people? What have people been for 8 years? Busy. We’re cool, but they’re busy. There’s so much going on. They haven’t found the time for fill-in-the-blank. They’ve love to catch up, but. They’re just so tired. They have plans that land precisely at the same time!

Now, there’s meet-ups and ways to put yourself out there, but also, that’s it’s own kind of job, just like endlessly dating tends to mount discouraging experiences.

This sense that we’re in “information silos” stoked by the hateful algorithms I think is a natural extension of our practice of being too busy. We’re too occupied. We’re too…everything. We don’t choose anything for ourselves and just sing the song of the oppressive box we’re trapped in. Worse, from my view, if you begin to insist that this is empty, nonsense, or at the extremes rude and pathetic, now you license people to, somehow, ignore and distance themselves from you even harder. It’s then as though the shaking of the last vestiges of hope for reconnection was the final goal.

[1263] Much Too Much

“There’s just so much going on.”

This is one of the most common refrains I hear from clients and friends alike. Friends are either working, navigating children, or in a worst case dealing with something health related. “The world” is often invoked along with the idea and all of its “stupid people.” Whether we simply call it “stress” or a sense of being “overwhelmed,” the sentiment is such that, whatever the ask, task, or invitation, it’s “too much.” If they’re feeling vaguely hopeful it’s “one day.”

 

They’re not wrong, in the broadest sense. In American society, at least, what might have been “simple” or “normal” aspects of a life worth living have turned into privileges and class-warfare. The things I get to do are a direct result of the sacrifices of things my parents could take for granted. The fun things I do or buy always feel like indulgence. They always feel like “I don’t really need,” because I’m playing an emotional hedging game. Will I regret the T-shirt or burger more than take solace in my ability to afford them, if only barely or occasionally?

 

I don’t feel old, but I had a good long moment while I was driving home yesterday where the idea of “38” seemed like an incredibly long time to have been around. “Pushing 40,” as they say. I’ve never wanted kids, but if I started tomorrow, I’d be 10 years older than my dad when he started. I’ve, still, never had a job for longer than 2 and a half years. I own plenty of shit, and I’ve got extremely hard in the “experiences” lane of affordable shows and trips.

 

This morning has felt like “a lot.” I was tired enough on the way home yesterday I pulled into a parking lot to nap. I got home and went to sleep, waking up at 2, and now feeling…well, that’s why I’m writing. There’s things I wish to accomplish. There’s things I’m extremely annoyed have been forced upon me to combat. There’s things akin to chores I’ll try to do later. My contacts are acting up. I’m itchy. My mouth and throat are dry. I want to sleep more, but I’m not convinced it would happen.

 

What’s on my plate?

 

I got pulled over for a broken headlight, and it turned into a, likely, illegal search. It’s been expensive and stressful figuring out how to request all the records related to the stop. I’m getting bounced around departments, inane pushback, and seemingly no matter what combination of words I use or attempts I make does it lock in that I want all records that pertain to me, the officers, the dog, and the stop. I spent 10 weeks not getting paid by the state of Indiana, just long enough for this to happen while my insurance had lapsed, and now I’m having to spend hundreds more, on top of a ticket, to combat an abuse of power, technically, from the same entity that delayed me getting my insurance paid.

I also got an alleged traffic infringement from a camera on the highway. Per A.I., their own filings contradict their claims, so I’m also operating pro se and trying to piece together what I need to push against this surveillance state bullshit and machine claims that will eventually track and tax us into ever further forms of internally punishing psychosis.

 

I’m still working on civic-mirror.com. I have the Claude Max now that lets me work like I needed to work to get it where it is, but it’s a huge undertaking, and I’m feeling increasingly isolated and sensing overwhelm when I try to pick a lane to focus on developing. I wanted to use my experience requesting these records to build a “spine” for others to follow when they wanted to do the same. That’s going to involve parsing something like 45 emails, clarifications, and redirections so I can develop steps 1 and 2. That’s 2 police departments in 1 county in 1 miserable state on one, tangible, practical issue.

 

I’ve reached out to online-form systems for attorneys. No surprise, they didn’t respond in the time window they said they would. I got a call back from a pro-bono office who doesn’t handle my kind of case, but, of course while driving, managed to find a charismatic 70-something lawyer who functionally hi-jacked the call to talk about an array of things she wished to share about her life. It’s the mental labor of trying to find and then navigating the pieces of a puzzle destined for a messy or unclear picture that feels heavy.

 

I have some form digitizing to get done, some spreadsheet re-organizing, and perhaps a single individual session with a client. I need to put away laundry and buy toilet paper. I’m not seriously obligated to do any of it but for what I claim about my values and identity. When I’m not tired, aggravated by my eye, needing to shit, and digging out the useless anxiety of my alleged obligations, I’m exceptionally capable, motivated, angry, and excited about the prospect of pursuing my goals until their failure point. When it’s hard to feel that, I write.

 

It’ll be an hour or 2 before the offices I need to call will even be open.